DLA changing to PIP in UK - help available from Spartacus

For those of us in the UK who are in receipt of the Disability Living Allowance, you are probably aware that the government are intending to change this to the Personal Independence Payment. You may not know that there is a public consultation out at the moment about PIP.

There has been a small team of people working under the Spartacus banner (after the so-called Spartacus Report into the government's first PIP consultation) who have managed to beat the government's horrible documents into some sort of understandable language and have produced an "Unofficial Guide to the PIP Consultation" which you can find here.

There's also a forum set up to help people respond to the consultation, and to have a chance to talk to other people in the same, rather leaky boat so that we can try to find the best way to get the government to listen to our concerns. The forum can be found here.

There's also more information here about how to get the message out to the wider public and other organisations and associations who may be interested but also might not know that there is actually a consultation going on. We are trying to get 10,000 responses in by the end of April 30th!

The government are looking to make a 20% budget cut in the move from DLA to PIP. This means that approximately half a million people will no longer qualify for any help with their illness or disability at all. This is just unacceptable and we need to make sure that PIP is fit for purpose and supports those who need it. Please help if you can!

Thanks a lot to all of those working on this. I'm afraid that I just don't have the energy to look in to this stuff now, but it is really important, and something that will harm a lot of seriously ill people. Hopefully the public will start to care about that at some point.

That's ok Esther, after working on the blasted thing solidly for the last month I don't have the energy either!

We've got eight weeks anyway until the consultation ends, and hopefully the forum will help with ideas for responding as people become aware of what's happening, it's more about raising awareness at the moment.